Touch-Tone Telephone Systems are well-known and extend throughout the United States. Such systems have been used for normal telephone conversations and as Data Sets but have not, to applicant's knowledge, achieved their full utilization as a communications interface, such as achieved by the present invention and the invention described and claimed in my copending U.S. Patent Application Ser. No. 97,687, filed Nov. 27, 1979 and entitled "Improved Verbally Interactive Telephone Interrogation System", in which the Touch-Tone type telephone is utilized to transmit unique signals over a captured telephone line to provide a verbally interactive telephone interrogation system, as in the aforementioned copending patent application, or to provide an interactive telephone answering system capable of caller selectable routing of an incoming call to a desired receiving telephone in accordance with a verbally interractive prerecorded decision tree format as in the present invention. Interrogation systems, or multiple choice selectible response systems are well known, such as exemplified by the prior art cited in the aforementioned copending patent application; namely U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,194,089; 3,947,972; 4,078,316; 3,950,618; 4,153,370; 3,651,471; 4,008,369; 4,216,497; 4,107,735; 3,906,450; 2,674,512; 3,744,712; 3,744,712; 3,776,453; 4,023,729; 3,974,335; 3,584,142; 3,654,708; 3,668,312, 3,729,581; 2,777,901; 3,194,895; 3,245,157; 3,273,260; 3,255,536; 3,284,923; 3,477,144; 3,484,950, 3,538,621, 3,546,791; 3,623,238; 3,665,615; 3,708,891; 3,763,577 and 3,774,316. The aforementioned systems also include broadcast audience poll systems such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,674,512; 3,744,712; 3,776,453; 3,974,335; 4,023,729 and 3,950,618. Moreover, automatic telephone answering systems employing multitrack prerecorded messages in a fixed format are known, such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,194,089, however such prior art systems are not truly interactive telephone answering systems capable of enabling caller selectable routing of an incoming call to a desired receiving telephone in accordance with a verbally interactive prerecorded decision tree format, merely providing for the recording of messages by the caller and the reception of prerecorded messages by that caller. Thus, none of the prior art systems known to applicant is a verbally interactive telephone answering system enabling caller selectable routing of an incoming call to a desired receiving telephone in accordance with a verbally interactive perecorded decision tree format, such as a system in which the caller may pass through a verbally interactive decision tree process before indicating which telephone extension the caller desires to be connected to, with this extension being automatically rung due to a prerecorded arming signal, or with the call being automatically forwarded due to prerecorded dialing codes located on the verbally interactive multitrack tape. In addition, although conventional telephone answering machines enable the owner to listen to the incoming message as it is being recorded, there are no such systems known to applicant which enable call screening in a variable decision tree format such as utilized in the present invention. Moreover, although two-way communication systems have become popular for purposes of polling or interrogation, such as the cable TV system known as QUBE, these prior art systems are not individualized verbally interactive systems nor do they enable caller selectable routing of incoming calls in accordance with a verbally interactive prerecorded decision tree format.
These disadvantages of the prior art are overcome by the present invention.